Often the world can enter fully into the nature of their loss: their
son, admired, appreciated, young, perhaps handsome, with a noble path

before him, leading to fortune, possibly to fame, excites universal
regret; society joins in the grief, and alleviates while it magnifies

it. But there is another sorrow of mothers who alone know what their
child was really; who alone have received his smiles and observed the

treasures of a life too soon cut short. That sorrow hides its woe, the
blackness of which surpasses all other mourning; it cannot be

described; happily there are but few women whose heart-strings are
thus severed.

Before Madame du Bousquier returned to town, Madame du Ronceret, one
of her good friends, had driven out to Prebaudet to fling this corpse

upon the roses of her joy, to show her the love she had ignored, and
sweetly shed a thousand drops of wormwood into the honey of her bridal

month. As Madame du Bousquier drove back to Alencon, she chanced to
meet Madame Granson at the corner of the rue Val-Noble. The glance of

the mother, dying of her grief, struck to the heart of the poor woman.
A thousand maledictions, a thousand flaming reproaches, were in that

look: Madame du Bousquier was horror-struck; that glance predicted and
called down evil upon her head.

The evening after the catastrophe, Madame Granson, one of the persons
most opposed to the rector of the town, and who had hitherto supported

the minister of Saint-Leonard, began to tremble as she thought of the
inflexible Catholic doctrines professed by her own party. After

placing her son's body in its shroud with her own hands, thinking of
the mother of the Saviour, she went, with a soul convulsed by anguish,

to the house of the hated rector. There she found the modestpriest in
an outer room, engaged in putting away the flax and yarns with which

he supplied poor women, in order that they might never be wholly out
of work,--a form of charity which saved many who were incapable of

begging from actual penury. The rector left his yarns and hastened to
take Madame Granson into his dining-room, where the wretched mother

noticed, as she looked at his supper, the frugal method of his own
living.

"Monsieur l'abbe," she said, "I have come to implore you--" She burst
into tears, unable to continue.

"I know what brings you," replied the saintly man. "I must trust to
you, madame, and to your relation, Madame du Bousquier, to pacify

Monseigneur the Bishop at Seez. Yes, I will pray for your unhappy
child; yes, I will say the masses. But we must avoid all scandal, and

give no opportunity for evil-judging persons to assemble in the
church. I alone, without other clergy, at night--"

"Yes, yes, as you think best; if only he may lie in consecrated
ground," said the poor mother, taking the priest's hand and kissing

it.
Toward midnight a coffin was clandestinely borne to the parish church

by four young men, comrades whom Athanase had liked the best. A few
friends of Madame Granson, women dressed in black, and veiled, were

present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat
intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin,

which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet
choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was

noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden
cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter

to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice was raised
to blame the rector; the bishop kept silence. The piety of the mother

redeemed the impiety of the son's last act.
Some months later, the poor woman, half beside herself with grief, and

moved by one of those inexplicable thirsts which misery feels to steep
its lips in the bitter chalice, determined to see the spot where her

son was drowned. Her instinct may have told her that thoughts of his
could be recovered beneath that poplar; perhaps, too, she desired to

see what his eyes had seen for the last time. Some mothers would die
of the sight; others give themselves up to it in saintly adoration.

Patient anatomists of human nature cannot too often enunciate the
truths before which all educations, laws, and philosophical systems

must give way. Let us repeat continually: it is absurd to force
sentiments into one formula: appearing as they do, in each individual

man, they combine with the elements that form his nature and take his
own physiognomy.

Madame Granson, as she stood on that fatal spot, saw a woman approach
it, who exclaimed,--

"Was it here?"
That woman wept as the mother wept. It was Suzanne. Arriving that

morning at the hotel du More, she had been told of the catastrophe. If
poor Athanase had been living, she meant to do as many noble souls,

who are moneyless, dream of doing, and as the rich never think of
doing,--she meant to have sent him several thousand francs, writing up

the envelope the words: "Money due to your father from a comrade who
makes restitution to you." This tender scheme had been arranged by

Suzanne during her journey.
The courtesan caught sight of Madame Granson and moved rapidly away,

whispering as she passed her, "I loved him!"
Suzanne, faithful to her nature, did not leave Alencon on this

occasion without changing the orange-blossoms of the bride to rue. She
was the first to declare that Madame du Bousquier would never be

anything but Mademoiselle Cormon. With one stab of her tongue she
revenged poor Athanase and her dear chevalier.

Alencon now witnessed a suicide that was slower and quite differently
pitiful from that of poor Athanase, who was quickly forgotten by

society, which always makes haste to forget its dead. The poor
Chevalier de Valois died in life; his suicide was a daily occurrence

for fourteen years. Three months after the du Bousquier marriage
society remarked, not without astonishment, that the linen of the

chevalier was frayed and rusty, that his hair was irregularly combed
and brushed. With a frowsy head the Chevalier de Valois could no

longer be said to exist! A few of his ivory teeth deserted, though the
keenest observers of human life were unable to discover to what body

they had hitherto belonged, whether to a foreign legion or whether
they were indigenous, vegetable or animal; whether age had pulled them

from the chevalier's mouth, or whether they were left forgotten in the
drawer of his dressing-table. The cravat was crooked, indifferent to

elegance. The negroes' heads grew pale with dust and grease. The
wrinkles of the face were blackened and puckered; the skin became

parchment. The nails, neglected, were often seen, alas! with a black
velvet edging. The waistcoat was tracked and stained with droppings

which spread upon its surface like autumn leaves. The cotton in the
ears was seldom changed. Sadness reigned upon that brow, and slipped

its yellowing tints into the depths of each furrow. In short, the
ruins, hitherto so cleverly hidden, now showed through the cracks and

crevices of that fine edifice, and proved the power of the soul over
the body; for the fair and dainty man, the cavalier, the young blood,

died when hope deserted him. Until then the nose of the chevalier was
ever delicate and nice; never had a damp black blotch, nor an amber

drop fall from it; but now that nose, smeared with tobacco around the
nostrils, degraded by the driblets which took advantage of the natural

gutter placed between itself and the upper lip,--that nose, which no
longer cared to seem agreeable, revealed the infinite pains which the

chevalier had formerly taken with his person, and made observers
comprehend, by the extent of its degradation, the greatness and

persistence of the man's designs upon Mademoiselle Cormon.
Alas, too, the anecdotes went the way of the teeth; the clever sayings

grew rare. The appetite, however, remained; the old nobleman saved
nothing but his stomach from the wreck of his hopes; though he

languidly prepared his pinches of snuff, he ate alarming dinners.
Perhaps you will more fully understand the disaster that this marriage

was to the mind and heart of the chevalier when you learn that his
intercourse with the Princess Goritza became less frequent.

One day he appeared in Mademoiselle Armande's salon with the calf of
his leg on the shin-bone. This bankruptcy of the graces was, I do

assure you, terrible, and struck all Alencon with horror. The late
young man had become an old one; this human being, who, by the

breaking-down of his spirit, had passed at once from fifty to ninety
years of age, frightened society. Besides, his secret was betrayed; he

had waited and watched for Mademoiselle Cormon; he had, like a patient
hunter, adjusted his aim for ten whole years, and finally had missed

the game! In short, the impotent Republic had won the day from Valiant
Chivalry, and that, too, under the Restoration! Form triumphed; mind

was vanquished by matter, diplomacy by insurrection. And, O final